If the question is posed, most non-art affiliated people reportedly cannot name five women artists off the top of their heads. Those who can quickly identify women artists tend to list American modernist Georgia O’Keeffe, Mexican icon Frida Kahlo and the Pennsylvania-born French Impressionist Mary Cassatt. Probe a bit further and one might hear of Grandma Moses and her sprightly folk scenes, or the Canadian landscape painter Emily Carr, but in general, women artists past and present tend not to be as well-recalled as their male counterparts.
Georgia O’Keeffe and Agnes Tait
Georgia O’Keeffe would no doubt be thrilled to see how her reputation has bloomed like one of her own huge floral portraits, and surely if the question were asked as to which 20th century painter spent many formative years in New York before gravitating to the American Southwest, O’Keeffe would be the correct reply. Aside from Agnes Tait, that is. In her pre-New Mexico days, O‘Keeffe indeed lived in Manhattan and summered at Lake George through the 1920s, just as O‘Keeffe‘s contemporary Tait grew up in and worked in New York before her Southwest life.
Agnes Tait was born in Greenwich Village in 1894 and studied at the National Academy of Design with Leon Kroll. In her early career, she posed as a model for Ashcan School artist George Wesley Bellows and went to Paris’s Ecole des Beaux-Arts for further courses in lithography. Tait enjoyed traveling and accepted a commission from a major American fruit company to capture tropical scenes in Jamaica and Haiti; she also visited Mexico around this time and had her first Manhattan gallery show in 1932.
Tait’s association with the New Deal’s Public Works of Art Program during the Great Depression gave her the means to paint one of her best-known scenes, the finely-detailed Skating in Central Park. Tait and her husband moved to Santa Fe in 1941, and the Southwest would become Agnes’ home base until her death forty years later. Tait’s artwork was featured in many museum shows during her life and remains part of various permanent collections.
Frida Kahlo and Maria Izquierdo
Which 20th century female Mexican painter was the lover of another famous Mexican artist? Frida Kahlo as the wife of muralist Diego Rivera would definitely fit the bill, but another correct response would be Maria Izquierdo, a contemporary of Kahlo who had a meaningful affair with Oaxaca native Rufino Tamayo.
Maria Izquierdo was born in Jalisco in 1902; married by the age of fourteen, she eventually escaped the restrictive union her family had arranged for her to pursue an artistic career. She met painter Rufino Tamayo in Mexico City and became romantically and creatively involved with him, until Tamayo ended the relationship and left her for a younger woman who was also his student.
Like Frida Kahlo, Maria Izquierdo included native elements in her work and often dressed in native Mexican styles. Her paintings were richly colored and intriguingly themed, and she was the first female Mexican artist to have her own exhibit outside of Mexico. Additionally, Izquierdo and Kahlo’s artworks share a sense of personal mysticism, such as Izquierdo’s painting Sueño y presentimiento, a scene which prophesied the debilitating stroke that Izquierdo suffered in 1949.
Mary Cassatt and Lilla Cabot Perry
Which female artist was the daughter of a well-to-do 19th century American family and was strongly influenced by the French Impressionists? Such a question might prompt the reply of Mary Cassatt, which would be absolutely right—until Lilla Cabot Perry (1848-1933) is considered. Perry was born in Boston and grew up in an educated and cultured household, but she did not begin formal artistic studies until after the birth of her third daughter in 1884. Lilla’s husband was a scholar whose studies fortunately led the family to Paris, allowing Lilla to continue her coursework abroad.
While in France, Perry had such an intense response to the paintings of Impressionist master Claude Monet that she relocated to Giverny to be able to work with Monet as a mentor. Perry became good friends with Monet, while Mary Cassatt was close friends with Edgar Degas. Perry was later inspired by Japanese art—as Mary Cassatt had been—after Perry’s husband moved the family to Tokyo. Like Cassatt, Perry often painted domestic scenes or interiors, and while Perry exhibited often and enjoyed a fair amount of success during her life, her name has never been as prominent as Mary’s.
CLARA and 18,000 More
The National Museum of Women in the Arts’ CLARA database is an excellent internet resource offering biographical information on some 18,000 female visual artists. Browsing through CLARA can be a great way to learn more about well-known and not so well-known women painters, photographers, sculptors, designers and printmakers, and the name CLARA itself is in honor of Clara Peeters, a 17th century Flemish still-life artist also very much worth discovering.
